THE FONSECA LAB

Gregory Fonseca, PhD

Principal Investigator

Dr. Fonseca completed his Ph.D. in the lab of Dr. Joe Mymryk at the University of Western Ontario. Here, he studied the innate immune response to adenovirus infection. After the completion of his Ph.D., Dr. Fonseca pursued post-doctoral training in the lab of Dr. Chris Glass at UCSD working on transcription factor recruitment in the genome using machine learning. He was recruited to the RI-MUHC in the Meakins-Christie Laboratories in 2019 and has established a program working on lung macrophages in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.

Mikal El-Hajjar, MSc

PhD Student, Department of Experimental Medicine

Mikal completed her BSc and MSc in Microbiology and Immunology at Western University. She studied Onco-immunology with a focus on sensitizing cold tumours to immunotherapy. During her MSc, she studied the immune profile of neuroblastoma tumours to establish a therapy that would sensitize these tumours to immune checkpoint blockade therapy. Mikal is now working towards her PhD in the department of Experimental Medicine at McGill University. Her research focus in the Fonseca lab is on idiopathic lung fibrosis and elucidating the role that macrophages play in disease progression. She will also study the phenomenon known as inflamm-aging in the context of idiopathic lung fibrosis.

Orsolya Lapohos, MSc

PhD Student, Department of Quantitative Life Sciences

Orsolya completed both her BSc and MSc in Microbiology & Immunology at McGill between 2014 and 2020. During her MSc, she studied the effects of eicosanoids on hematopoiesis induced by mycobacterial infections in Dr. Maziar Divangahi's lab. She joined the Fonseca lab as a research assistant in the summer of 2020. In September 2020 she began her PhD in Quantitative Life Sciences, completing rotation projects under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Fonseca, Dr. Amin Emad, and Dr. Jun Ding. Her thesis project is co-supervised by Dr. Fonseca and Dr. Emad, and studies transcriptional regulatory networks at the intersection of immunology, genomics, and computational methods.

Jingtao Wang, MSc

PhD Student, Department of Experimental Medicine

Jingtao received his BE in Computer Science at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, and M.S. in Automated Science at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. During his MSc, he worked on developing single cell gene expression visualization tool in Dr. Ziv Bar-Joseph's group. He is now pursuing his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Fonseca and Dr. Jun Ding. Currently, he is mainly studying single cell data reconstruction using deep unsupervised learning and active learning.

Sahar Mikaeeli, MSc

PhD Student, Department of Experimental Medicine

Sahar completed her BSc in Cellular and Molecular Biology, and Genetics at Azad University in Tehran, Iran. She then completed her MSc in Experimental Medicine at McGill University. In January 2021, she started her PhD under the co-supervision of Dr. Sabah Hussain and Dr. Gregory Fonseca. Currently, she is studying the role of long non-coding RNAs in muscle atrophy.

Émilie Charette, BSc

MSc Student, Department of Experimental Medicine

Émilie was a member of the Fonseca lab from fall 2020 to spring 2021, through a collaboration with Dr. Simon Rousseau, as an undergraduate student. She was involved in projects touching on signaling pathways in cystic fibrosis lung disease. After completing her BSc in Microbiology & Immunology at McGill, she worked as a research assistant in the Fonseca lab before beginning her MSc in winter 2022. Her research will focus on the effects of administration of the anti-fibrotic drug Nintedanib in lung macrophage populations.

Ami Koga, BSc

Undergraduate Student, Physiology & Physics

Ami completed her undergraduate research project in the Fonseca lab from fall 2020 to spring 2021. Her work focused on ChIP-seq and RNA-seq analysis in cytokine-activated macrophages.

Carl Kristof-Tessier

Undergraduate Student

Carl is currently working on his undergraduate degree, majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Computer Science at McGill University. He enjoys developing machine learning models for transcriptomic data. During his time in the Fonseca lab, he researched feature selection techniques in the context of gene panels and diagnostics.

Claire Lorenzo

Undergraduate Student

Claire was a summer student working under the co-supervision of Dr. Gregory Fonseca and Dr. Jun Ding. She is currently studying Computer Science at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.